What’s Exchange 2010 – Exchange 14 of course, or the public name for the next version of Exchange.

I’ve picked a few things to talk about in this post and more will follow in due course.

Two links that will be immediately interesting are the download link and the beta documentation link.

Download the Beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

and find Exchange Beta documentation here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124558(EXCHG.140).aspx

The documentation gives you a great starting point. While a lot of the topics are headings only at this stage, even the headings give you a clue as to where things are headed. Here’s a look at one example:

Since SCC isn’t supported in 2010 anymore, knowing how to transition from SCC (Singe Copy Cluster)  to DAG (Database Availability Group)  based HA and DR is a big deal. Planning and deployment | Deploying Exchange 2010| Transitioning to Exchange 2010| Transitioning from Exchange 2007 LCS/CCR/SCR/SCC to Exchange 2010 is a fantastic example of a header which shows you that the Exchange team isn’t building new features without showing you how to get the a new end state.

As I mentioned above SCC and LCR do no longer exist and are replaced by Database availability groups (DAG). Why is DAG more highly available than SCC? Well fore one thing, depending on the failover rules, a single database will fail over to another host if it’s disk fails, as well as allowing up to 16! copies of the same database to be hosted around your network including on the other side of a WAN link. What helps here is that Databases are no longer connected to the server and will now be managed as an object on the organizational level as opposed to the server level.

Here are a few more points of interest in the storage arena:

• Storage Groups are gone. The Database is now the lowest point of management. What happens to logs and how are they configured? Stay tuned…..

• ESE improvements as well as DAG means HA and DR can be achieved without SANS on cheap storage. SAN’s can be eliminated altogether with really good IO performance available on SATA based storage. SATA disks are larger and run cooler than SAS. Performance on SATA disks has been good enough so far for us to expect some interesting guidance coming out of MS in the future on how to build 2010 based storage architectures…..

I’ve picked on a few areas of interest so far, however Exchange 2010 is a major release will a load of new features and one blog post cannot do it justice; The transport stack has been improved, RMS in OWA is awesome, RMS in the Transport Layer is awesome, wait until you see the new OWA interface, content management and  Exchange manageability has gone up several notches, just to name a FEW, so all in all I’m massively excited by the new version  of Exchange. More post on particular features coming soon.